Does keeping up with the changing trends in travel marketing become a case of déjà vu? Think you’ve heard it all before? Well, here are some ideas you may not have thought of, courtesy of Jim Nichols in iMediaConnection, the VP of Marketing at Apsalar, a mobile marketing agency.

It doesn’t take much to make disruptive marketing changes in an industry, and travel is no different. With the tidal wave of social media, content marketing, mobile marketing and everything else that’s made travel marketers jugglers of the new media, nothing seems to stay the same.

So what are some ideas that Nichols has noticed?

1.) The collaborative economy
Also called the sharing economy, it’s become the hallmark of marketing to younger demographics. They include everything from accommodations (AirBnb is the best example of this), transportation (Uber, Lyft, and their competition), vacation activities (Viator and Vayable), and meals (Vizeat), and allow for greater customization of the travel experience while often saving money and allowing for longer stays. Some retailers will offer on-the-premises services for these travelers. A current example is the Gap, who will take care of clothing emergencies with purchases brought to their rooms.

Sharing businesses will often market to millennials, the largest target group that mostly uses these services. One thing that you might overlook is how this phenomenon touches upon the Generation X and Generation Z cohorts on either side of the millennials. Keep this in mind when you think about how you could think about marketing ideas about the collaborative economy.

2.) Lifestyle heterogeneity
There’s a lot of diversity out there when it comes to travelers. The example that Nichols gives is the Holiday Inn of yesteryear, which along with Howard Johnson’s, was the only nationwide hotel option for many families. Each was the same, with the identical rooms, décor, amenities (which were often limited to the swimming pool and nothing more) and restaurant food.

Now, people are more discriminating and demanding when they are on vacation or a business trips. Most hotel chains have developed all kinds of versions to suit every person’s and family’s tastes, budgets and amenities preferences. All of this is determined by targeted data that reveals what travelers want, and hotels (as well as other travel providers) would be well advised to follow that trend.

What does this mean for you? Pay attention to your audience’s and customers’ preferences to personalize the travel experiences you offer. The more you can respond to their different lifestyle preferences, the more successful your business can be.

3.) Increasing “fit” expectations
When online travel agencies like Expedia first started, travelers were thrilled to get so many options to choose from with their flights, hotels, cars and anything else related to planning a trip. Now they’ve come to expect information that’s specifically tailored to the travel purpose and preferences. Nichols relates how people travel to Las Vegas head there for difference reasons – for bachelor/bachelorette celebrations, gaming, romantic getaways – and look for either budget or ultimate luxury accommodations, with the related activities that with each purpose.

Travel companies need to keep up by collecting necessary data to document and interpret these travelers’ needs and wants. What most don’t know is the segment of unstructured data that reveals even more personal preferences, allowing for an even greater fit to satisfy customers on their stay. This is done through use of natural language search and with analysis of past search and purchases on the internet. A company that Nichols mentions is WayBlazer, one of which can help you in this process.

4.) Omni-channel travel shopping
If your marketing messages haven’t gotten on several media devices, you’re unfortunately behind the curve. But that’s not a cause for despair – many travel companies haven’t done that either, or they’re not sure which would be the most effective.

The short answer is all of them. You just never know where your customers are going to find you, whether that’s on a desktop or laptop computer or on their mobile devices. You can make sure that the followers on your list have uniform login across every channel. Look into working with a device graph company to integrate booking and browsing data together. This will also help you with development of more dimensional customer profiles and personas, which can always help you in your marketing strategies.

5.) The advent of companion apps
This is basically a “done-for-you” app, where travelers can simply use this to research, book, check-in and even in the case of hotels, use the smartphone as a room key. It allows for convenience and avoids having to deal with staff. One obvious aspect about this development is determining guest preferences, where hotels can provide pillow and room location preferences or even provide a breakfast exactly the way a guest wants it.

How many of these trends have you seen or have implemented in your travel marketing? Are you wanting to try one of them? Share your thoughts below!

Have you heard about smart cities? You may want to – but first, a little background.

You’ve heard to before – mobile marketing is where everything’s at, especially as tech-dependent millennials and GenZ become the primary consumers of all markets. With both open data platforms and the phenomenon called the Internet of Things that allow for greater exchange information between organizations and users.

A simple definition from Jacob Morgan on Forbes.com follows: It’s “the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other),” allowing for the exchange of online data. Making information open means having it be more accessible to everyone. So in the context of travel and tourism, all of this techie stuff means mobile information, and the latest trend here is smart cities.

This is basically integrating everything a city does and applying technological solutions to manage their functioning. Those services include transportation, schools, municipal services, law enforcement, and anything that’s related to making a visitor’s experience more enjoyable.

Perhaps the most important feature of the smart cities concept is augmented reality, which involves people using their mobile devices, primarily phones, and being able to access information easily. Specifically, they can now simply point to a restaurant or place of interest and gain instant information without having to a search engine first, or go to a directory app like Yelp or TripAdvisor. They can also provide suggested itineraries and track public transportation schedules.

Smart cities: The next wave

Of course, this makes looking for travel information that much easier for visitors. An article on Skift showed that Fort Lauderdale’s and Palm Springs’ convention and visitors bureaus are already on board with this technology, and more are joining them.

Greg Curtin, founder and CEO of Civic Resource Group, is leading the way for CVB’s to take advantage of this growing phenomenon. He believes that the demand will only increase in 2016, since metro areas are putting the infrastructure in place to make all of this happen. He asks, “How can (civic leaders) pull all of this together and build on the concept of smart cities…How do we create smart, compelling experiences for our citizens, businesses and visitors?”

Curtin says the demand comes from travelers who want something more than just attending the conference or sticking around their hotel area. He acknowledges that the majority of travelers are eager to use mobile devices for travel information, and destination marketing organizations, convention and tourism bureaus and tour and activity providers would benefit to join up. They can now share the information provider role that TripAdvisor and Yelp have dominated for the past decade. The combined use of emerging technology and already-existing databases allow for cities to take information and repurpose it into a mobile-friendly format.

What does this mean for your travel business?

As more information becomes part of these programs, more DMO’s and travel businesses will get on board to increase exposure for their activities and attractions. What this means for you, the travel marketer, is another new way to promote your company that moves dramatically away from traditional forms of advertising or travel literature. Awareness and knowledge becomes as easy as pointing a mobile device, so be ready for this change. It’s coming sooner than you think.

Of course, this is more applicable if you live close to a major metropolitan area that is considering using smart city technology. But even if your travel business is based significantly further away from one, you still may want to find out from your local tourism bureau if they are thinking about this type of technology on a smaller scale. At some point, most of the traveling world will likely be covered by this type of mobile information.

Have you had any experience or are you currently working with any smart city technology in your travel marketing? Share your thoughts below!

OK, I have a confession. I didn’t want to go onto Instagram for the longest time, mostly because I simply thought it was for the Generation Z crowd. That demographic includes my teenage daughters, who go onto the social network on a nearly daily basis. No, hourly basis is more like it.

I even thought that Pinterest would take off in terms of popularity in travel marketing, so much that I wrote an article about how well matched the platform is for this industry. Well, I’ll just say it’s not the first time I’ve been off about something.

My kids in Portland, OR – the younger one (in pink) is probably on Instagram

But I’m over it now. I just started my Instagram account last week, for both this site and my travel blog website. It’s actually kind of fun, because it’s a primarily visual site. I don’t have to think about writing clever content or copy to get it noticed, although that certainly helps. It definitely helps with the blog site, CaliColorado Traveler, because visual content and a travel blog go hand-in-hand.

It’s a bit of different story with writing about travel marketing, though. That’s where I’m coming from with this blog entry – call it Instagram Travel Marketing 101. So I’m starting to learn what I need to get going on this supernova social channel.

Promoted content – Just like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all have some form of paid social media, Instagram is following suit. Even though it’s only in beta mode right now, it shows great promise. Travel Alberta, the tourism bureau for the western Canadian province, has nearly doubled its fan base from 92,000 to 175,000 through this new Instagram feature.

Carrousel Ads – Also in beta mode, this montage of photos can be most useful for multi-product campaigns, which is ideal for travel marketers who have many tours to offer. Only a few accounts have access to this feature, so it’s not quite ready for prime time. What makes this cool is that you can add a call to action on the final slide, which can encourage better conversions with your target audience

Inserting Links – Finally, Instagram is getting on the link-sharing bandwagon after being the go-to platform for photo and video sharing for the past two years. You will soon be able to connect the visual content directly to a link, so that you can easily promote new content on your site and not just your home page.

The biggest takeaways from this article are twofold. First, the fan growth rate for these destination marketing organizations averaged about 10% in July 2015. Schumacher pointed out that this figure represents a doubling of people who have liked a DMO through Instagram – a significant increase. The other observation noted here is engagement. Instagram appears to blow away nearly all of its social competition when it comes to getting fans to like and share and comment.

Do you have any thoughts or experiences with starting your Instagram marketing, or getting it going? Share them below!

Last month, I talked about the marketing problems that teams face on a regular basis and solutions for each. Applying a travel marketing spin on it all, I then talked about how you can deal with each in your particular business. These eight strategies are taken from a HubSpot article by Lindsay Kolowich.

Now for the first post of the new year, I review the last four marketing problems that might bedevil professionals, including you, in the course of your work. These are a little more advanced techniques. So even if you’re still in the startup or beginning stages of your business, keep these in mind as you progress with your marketing plans.

Training your team
In a travel marketing setting, you’re nearly always working with others, whether that’s on the account management or creative side. One strategy to use here is looking at each person’s strengths and weaknesses, work experience and commitment, then rate the expertise priority and ROI contribution. Of course, this will take longer to do with more staff. But in the end, this process can save a lot of future trouble.

You may also want to consider marketing training for your staff, which could be achieved in several ways. Think about self-study resources, webinars or even live trainings that could lead to certification.

Targeting content for an international audience
This can be an especially common issue with American companies, who often think they have to market to people here and not abroad. But if you’re not even developing a basic buyer persona about potential foreign customers, you could be missing out a great revenue generating opportunity.

First, try to look up some global marketing shortcuts or hacks that will help you understand the international buyers’ mindset. Then start to think about your content production where you will want to pay attention to seasonal information, differences in measurement units (most of the world uses the metric system), monetary references (don’t assume everyone accepts American dollars), and allowing translators the liberty to modify your copy if needed.

Hiring top talent
With ever-changing roles for creative and account management, marketers find that they’re constantly juggling ways to piece together a strong work team. That’s become more difficult when potential employees don’t always have the skills necessary to fufill a company’s overall goals.

Companies now would desire that their workers to have digital marketing, SEO, social media and content marketing skills. But these employees almost always have an area of strength that can be best utilized. Find out what that specialty is and fit it into the list of tasks that help fulfill your plans. If necessary, hire contracted or freelance help to get the job done.

Finding an executive sponsor
This idea simply means that you have a higher-up advocating for your efforts and agenda. This might be tough, because not everyone wants to put themselves out on a limb, professionally or fiscally. But if you’d like to have more budgetary resources in your corner, this might be the marketing challenge you will most want to meet.

How do you do this? Try to have an executive look at the inbound marketing data that supports your efforts and future plans. It definitely works better than anything that looks lofty, like a mission statement.

Taken with the marketing problems from the last post, these eight together can either derail your best laid plans, or help you and your travel business to grow like never before. The choice is completely up to you, so don’t shy away from the challenge.

What other marketing challenges do you encounter that could sidetrack your business and professional goals? Share your thoughts below!

You love your work in travel marketing and know enough that your colleagues bestow the title of “guru,” “ninja” or “master” or some other laudatory title. They will more often than not come to you for help if they’re stuck or need a final arbiter. You might even dream about it…in a good way.

But not even masters have all the answers all of the time. You still might have some issues here and there, and you can certainly run into problems that don’t always have an easy solution. Sometimes they can make your usually enjoyable work a pain in the rear. This article by Lindsey Kolowich in HubSpot details the eight of these issues. While she writes about marketing challenges in general, I’ll apply them to travel marketing in particular. We’ll take a look at the first four here, then look at the next four in a couple of weeks.

Businesswoman carrying big increasing graph. Growth concept

1. What’s your ROI?

Yep, everyone’s favorite metric – not really. But how else will you know how well your marketing efforts are paying off? The best way you can achieve the return on investment is using the marketing software and CRM (customer relationship management) programs. Also, check in with your analytics several times a week to see how your digital marketing is going. Keep meticulous records of everything to make your case that your travel campaigns are truly paying off.

2. Budget, budget, budget

Doesn’t your work always seem to depend on number crunching? Of course, if you work for larger company, budget is less of a concern than when you’re at a smaller one. But no matter what your company size is, you need to prove your spending is bringing in results, or ROI. If you’re putting more effort into your inbound marketing, know that it’s often for the long-term, and having the fiscal resources is critical. So reference #1 again, and pay special attention to those numbers.

3. Who’s minding the (online) store?

Managing your website is a necessity, but it’s not something just anyone wants to do. The smaller your company is, the less likelihood that you have a person or team to take charge of it, and you’re the one who has to do the honors. But even with a substantial team, updating and optimizing content, making the website design user and mobile friendly, and taking care of the existing regular visitors is always a chore. The most efficient solution to this is to hire outside help, either agency partners or freelancers. Also consider hosting your site that puts all aspects of your digital marketing in one convenient place.

4. Techie talk

If you have a knack for this kind of thing, then you can probably stop reading here. Now this isn’t talking about the channel (social media, email, content marketing, etc.) so much as it’s about the software and tools you need for them. Automation is the key here – you want to use something that’s going to put everything together with minimum fuss. When you can deftly use this kind of program, you can reasonable expect your ROI to increase and even a larger budget at your disposal. A great resource for travel marketers here is Tnooz

, the UK-based news source for what’s working in tech and travel.

During January, we’ll talk about the next four marketing problems that bug even the most dedicated travel marketer, and how you can get around them.

How are you dealing with your marketing’s most vexing issues? Share your thoughts below!